Some time ago an icon contest was hosted on KDE-Look.org to find a new icon for KPDF. Since then, we have interviewed the jury, and mentioned KPDF Coolness here on the dot. The jury had a tough time deciding on a winning icon, but they have finally chosen the icon to be used in the next version of KPDF. However, before we reveal to you the winner we would like to mention some of the other runners-up.

Some words about the submissions ...

The jury, which consisted of Albert Astals Cid, Enrico Ros, Frank Karlitschek and Kenneth Wimer have announced several extra awards:

meNGele [Nenad Grujicic] was the first to submit his entry, KPDF Pack, merely a few hours after the contest was announced.

We would like to give DrFaustus [Mario GarcÃ­a H.] the concept prize for his submission: E.G.O. kpdf. When looking carefully, you can see that the "K" is actually a person reading. She is wearing glasses, petting her cat and smiling. Look closer and you'll see it, too!

KPDF_icon_2 -Library Card by dadeisvenm [Donald Ade] -
We would like to give Donald the mis-concept prize :-) A KPDF Library Card... get it and print millions!

This KPDF wallpaper is a must have for 2 fanatic programmers working on KPDF. Thanks for his wallpaper theobroma [J.D.]!

The Giotto prize: the perfect circle. The submission by Quickly received the Giotto prize. It's the only icon without a single corner!

We had some quite creative and productive artists working - we would like give the productivity award to dadeisvenm [Donald Ade]: With 6 icons and 1 splashscreen, he was the most productive artist during this contest.

And the winner is ...

"But who won?" you might ask. Well the jury have given their scores, and it has become clear that Marco Martin has won the icon contest for another kpdf icon. Congratulations Marco!

When asked for his comment on winning this contest Marco replied: "What can I say, I'm very happy that you liked it and that I could do something for the project that I love... oh my God how I'm banal :-)"

KPDF-hacker Albert Astals Cid expresses the sentiment of the jury best: With 33 entries I am very impressed with and proud of the artist community at KDE-Look.org.

Yes, what about text selection, text search and internet links from within a PDF document? Are these now possible in KPDF? I must admit I am a bit rusty here. But I thank the programmers for the wonderful KDE.

Text selection did work last time I tried, and links inside the PDF works for those PDF with table of contents etc. Text search is supposed to work, but I have not tried. And I would guess internet links got fixed at the same time as the internal links.

I recently upgraded kde on my Mandrake 10.1 community
to version 3.3.1. And kghostview cannot render eps
images anymore. It was working alright before and only
kghostview has this problem; gv and ggv show up eps
images right.

There are no legal concerns because look and feel (such as icons) can not be patented. Also, keeping it close enough but still distinct has the advantage that the users will understand what it is.

The icon that you prefer has the disadvantage that it has text inside the picture. Icons are supposed to be language-independent so they do not have to be translated when KDE is translated into many languages. For this reason, the icon you mention is not even acceptable quality.

I have a feeling that that Adobe thing would fall under the realm of a trademark, so yes it could be a legal thing. I think the stacked books would have been a better choice, but for different reasons.

You mean Acrobat Reader's logo? Sorry, but have you ever seen Adobe how Acrobat's application icon and logo look like? Acrobat's aplication icon is a rectangle which has Adobe's logo on top of it (white letter A on red background) and Arobat's logo has either a running man or a juggler as main element).

I guess you probably mean that the red ribbon in the selected Kpdf icon is a ripp off of the red ribbon from the Adobe Acrobat's mime icon. Well, you are wrong again. The red ribbon in Kpdf icon represents a letter K, and the ribon in Acrobat's mime icon is a triangle.

"...most Ikons were bad from a usability perspective."

Well, wrong again. The icon which was chosen as the winner of the contest is good from usability point of view. It is simple (it has only two elements: a book and a ribbon), and it is distinctive (there is no other icon in default Crystal icon set that is similar to Kpdf one).

I would also agree with Gerd. Whilst it's not identical to the Adobe ribbon, it is very very close. I'm pretty sure a judge would rule in favour of Adobe on this. Legally, to include this is incredibly risky and stupid of KDE.

Just remember Lindows vs Windows - a common word (that should never been trademarked in the first place). A large number of European courts rule in favour of Microsoft. Now personally, I didn't think it infringed, but it's the courts that matter, not individual personal viewpoints.

Now before anyone has a go at me, I do realise the difference between a word logo and a image logo. BUT - they are still identifiable "images"

I'm not trying to be mean, or play favourites, or bad mouth any of the artists - they are all brilliant, if it wasn't for the legal perspective i'd agree with the judges. I'm just worried about the legal side of things, have we learnt nothing from the fiaSCO? Remember, Adobe is a high profile developer, with a large userbase. If this went to jury, most of the jury would have used Adobe Acrobat at some time in the past, and I would say would easily recognise the ribbon, and judge that it's similar enough to be considered a rippoff.

Use at your own risk. Can we please include other icons for kpdf so that users can choose other icons and avoid any risk?

I just tried compiling it from cvs directly and after fixing a minor issue it worked, but after make install I got the exact same error:
kdecore (KLibLoader): WARNING: KLibrary: /usr/kde/3.3/lib/kde3/libkpdfpart.so: undefined symbol: init_libkpdfpart
kdecore (KLibLoader): WARNING: The library libkpdfpart does not offer an init_libkpdfpart function.

The warning indicated an empty .moc file was created, the product of which is essentially the same as using 'touch' in this case. I hadn't noticed it before, though I remembing receiving that same warning. It appears to be a small problem with the source, introduced a few CVS updates ago judging from my experience with successive builds (it could be easily overlooked by the developers if document.moc was already present in the build directory from past builds).

In any event, the empty document.moc file is now created, so 'make' should now build it.

I downloaded this and got the following error from ./configure:
checking if UIC has KDE plugins available... no
configure: error: you need to install kdelibs first.

What does this mean? I do indeed have kdelibs installed (3.3.1).

Also, in order to build the cvs version, do I have to get the entire KDE source directory? cvs co -r kpdf_experiments kdegraphics/kpdf gave me a source tree that clearly needed other stuff in order to be configured.

I would guess the statments reflects the fact that PDF are the most used e-book format. None of the other formats comes even close.

PS support is handled by KGhostView. You cold probably add support in KPdf with some kparts magic, byt why. As for suporting other e-books formats, those usually contain some sort of DRM and thus creating problems for users/developers not living in the free world(DCMCA etc). The easiest one to support I belive would be Adobes ebook format, which I belive simply are some DRM atop of a PDF variant.

please, define 'others'. PS can be supported but what else?
I have 130+ ebooks in pdf, a couple in TXT and that's all..
PS can be supported.. I'm pretty sure kpdf can handle those before 1 year, but what about the mysterious 'others' ?

Well you have Adobes ebook format as I mentioned earlier. You have some ebook format used on PDA's like palm and winCE (.prc). Then there is the format used by Rocket EBook(.rb). And of you have Microsoft Reader ebooks (.lit), which looks like some sort of packaged html-subset much like the html help documents (.chm), but combined with DRM.

It seems that KPDF is the only KDE application that doesn't respect KDE's Font settings about anti-aliasing etc. I have set it up so that I have RGB sub-pixel anti-aliased text in KDE and it works greta in all KDE applications except in KPDF's PDF rendering (the menus etc. are fine - just not the PDF rendering). Any idea when this is going to be fixed? Currently, I use acrobat's CoolType to get this. But, there is no reason why we can not use regular Qt's font rendering to achieve this.

Also, is there support to rotate the PDF ? This helps a lot in reading books on laptops - I typically just rotate the PDF view by 90 degrees in acrobat reader and that way the book page is of the same size as the laptop screen. Very helpful!!

These two are the main features that I find missing for my e-book reading needs.

I just compiled KPDF and I really love it. Acrobat Reader is the only non open-source application I am using regularly on my computer and it looks like there is finally a very good open source alternative showing up! Keep up the good work!